ITZ Publishing

5 Mobile Advertising Myths

Read the original post at:http://mobileadvertisinghub.com/5-mobile-advertising-myths/

 

Spending on mobile advertising is growing fast, but many companies are still wondering if mobile advertising is a fad, an expensive experiment, or whether it’s a new way of reaching customers for the long-term.

Just as with any new innovation, there are often confusing myths and misconceptions surrounding the technology and often obscuring people’s view of the opportunities.

Don’t let these myths hold you back from pursuing mobile advertising:

• “It’s too expensive.” Reality: mobile advertising is among the most cost-effective and accountable marketing that you can do. Admob recently moved to a market-driven model where advertisers bid for ad space, and the result was that clicks are now as low as $0.01. In addition, there are plenty of options for advertisers to build a customized mobile advertising campaign that delivers the right results at a cost-effective price. You can choose from Cost Per Click (CPC), cost per impression (CPI) or cost per thousand Impressions (CPM) to align your mobile advertising budget with your goals.
• “Customers won’t buy on mobile.” Reality: The size of the U.S. mobile advertising market reached nearly $800 million by the end of 2010, and the worldwide market for mobile advertising is expected to grow to $13.5 billion in 2015. Surely all of these advertisers aren’t spending money without expecting to see a return. More importantly, customers are becoming increasingly comfortable with buying on their mobile devices. Just as people used to say that “Amazon can’t make money because people aren’t comfortable with buying online,” people are only going to get more comfortable with making purchases from their mobile phones and mobile devices. Mobile advertising is going to be a big part of the future of eCommerce, and the companies that embrace this medium now will have an advantage.
• “People ignore mobile ads.” Reality: in many cases, mobile ads are harder to ignore than online ads and can have a higher click-through rate. According to a recent study of mobile ads for the financial services industry, mobile ads achieved a 19% click-through rate (compared to a click-through rate of less than 1% for desktop banner ads). One reason is that people relate to their mobile devices differently than they do to a desktop computer – a mobile device creates a more intimate and personal relationship with the user, serving as a guide and almost like an extension of the person’s personality and interests. Instead of being one of several banner ads competing for a person’s attention, mobile ads can get “up close and personal” in a way that other online advertising cannot.
• “Mobile advertising only works for apps.” Reality: some of the most powerful mobile advertising campaigns have been for products and services other than applications. Companies from Starbucks to Diesel jeans to Coldwell Banker Realty have used mobile advertising and mobile marketing to build awareness, promote products and strengthen customer relationships without the goal of selling apps.
• “Mobile advertising is complicated.” Reality: any new marketing technique can be tricky when you are trying it for the first time. Fortunately, there is a fast-growing array of tools and service providers to help companies leverage mobile advertising. This is a fast-growing market with many mobile ad developers seeking to serve the growing demand, and various platforms available to deliver your company’s messages to mobile device users.  Another important application of mobile advertising is the possibility of location-based mobile advertising to put highly relevant messages in front of customers based on where they are located and often, what type of buying decision they are considering.

As more companies get comfortable with the realities of mobile advertising, we expect to see more brands capitalizing on the opportunities to connect directly with customers with mobile ads. Don’t let outdated myths and misconceptions hold your company back from these new opportunities.

What’s your take on this? What myths and misconceptions about mobile advertising have you encountered, and how did you overcome them?

20 free, awesome social media monitoring tools

Read the original post on the excellent blog http://www.socialbrite.org here:

http://www.socialbrite.org/2011/01/11/guide-to-free-social-media-monitoring-tools/

 

 

 

Take the pulse of the social Web by hitting these rich targets

Ready for a listening program? There are a wealth of free monitoring tools to choose from.

 

10 social media monitoring tools: a downloadable flyer

Free monitoring tools may fill your needs if you work for a small nonprofit or your business has no need for more sophisticated services (coming tomorrow). Just remember: Free monitoring tools aren’t really free — they require an investment of staff time and analysis.

 

And a word of advice: Don’t begin with the tools. Begin with a strategy — a social media game plan. Think of this as a multi-step process: Listen, learn, engage, act and measure. Listening is only the first step — you need to take action on what you discover. (Socialbrite can help you with an integrated approach to social media.) 

(And so can ITZ Publishing!)

Here is our Guide to Free Social Media Monitoring Tools. Have your own favorites? Please share in the comments.

Monitor social campaigns

Wildfire: How is your brand performing in social?

1Wildfire, a startup focused on creating interactive promotions on social sites, last month launched Social Media Monitor, a tool that tracks and compares how brands are performing on Facebook and Twitter. Wildfire allows companies, small businesses, marketing agencies, nonprofits and bloggers to create their own branded interactive campaigns — including contests, giveaways, incentive-based surveys and sweepstakes — and to simultaneously publish them in multiple social networks and on their websites. More than 65,000 users have done so. As we understand this, the basic tools are free and Wildfire also sells premium services.

Monitor social networks & blogs

Social Mention: Widgets & social search

2Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches for keywords on social media platforms — including blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos and microblogging services — and provides metrics around keywords and “sentiment.” It also provides graphic illustrations or charts showing mentions per day or week. Download the free search bar for your browser and monitor anything from your brand to your cause. They also offer APIs and provide coding for your own keyword monitoring widgets.

Alternative:
• Collecta lets you enter any search term to receive real-time results for mentions in social media, in blog comments and on news sites.

Google Reader: Begin with a dashboard

3Social media monitoring begins with a dashboard. (See our Top 10 social media dashboard tools.) A good choice to begin your monitoring is Google Reader: Subscribe to the RSS feeds of top blogs in your sector, competitors’ sites, news sites, Twitter searches and more, all in one place. You can even subscribe to searches on sites like Flickr and YouTube, so you’ll get an update on any new image or video that matches your brand or cause. If the page you’re on doesn’t seem to have an RSS feed, try Feedyes.com. We also likeFeed Informer, which lets you splice multiple feeds together into one and filter for duplicates.

Alternatives: Bloglines, Netvibes.

BlogPulse: Take the pulse of the blogosphere

4BlogPulse from NM Incite is an automated trend discovery system for blogs that analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere. You can keep on top of key phrases, top blog posts, videos, key people news sources and more. But its real power lies in the options you have to track blog conversations based on topics or keywords. See which blogs, news posts, etc., are fueling the most conversations about your brand online.

Other blog monitoring services that should be in your arsenal:
• Technorati
• Google Advanced Blog Search
• IceRocket

Alltop: Identify the top blogs in your sector

5Alltop, Guy Kawasaki’s online magazine rack – or, more precisely, topic-based directory — lets you search for influential blogs in a given niche or subject. Add the feeds to your RSS reader and you have a more targeted monitoring process.

Monitor Twitter & Facebook

Hootsuite: Simplify your social efforts

6We’re fans of Hootsuite as a free tool that enables nonprofits and cause organizations to update multiple social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook) from a computer or mobile device. The free version lets you work with up to five social networks and two RSS feeds but is limited to one user for your organization’s account; it stores stat history for 30 days and is ad supported. For the paid version, see 10 paid social media monitoring services for nonprofits.

Alternatives:
• Tweetdeck
• Seesmic
• Cotweet

Twitter search options

7If Hootsuite or one of the other Twitter dashboard services doesn’t meet your needs, you have lots of other options to keep tabs on the Twitterverse. Here are a few:

• Twitter Advanced Search is the best way to ferret out tweets about a targeted sector. Look for keywords, search by location, date or with other filters.
• Track is a little-known Twitter feature that lets you track keywords and have them sent directly to your mobile phone as soon as they’re posted.
• Monitter lets you monitor Twitter for key words, phrases and topics being discussed online at a glance (though we still prefer Hootsuite for this).
• Twazzup is a dashboard program that monitors Twitter, Twazzup will let you know wheneer your keywords are mentioned in a tweet.
• PostRank analytics lets you uncover your influencers, identify which social networks give you the greatest traction and benchmark yourself against the competition.
• Pulse of the Tweeters uses data mining and sentiment analysis to mine millions of tweets and find the most influential people on Twitter around your cause or sector.
• Twitscoop lets you search and follow what’s buzzing on Twitter in real time.
• Twilert sends you emails when it sees keywords on Twitter that you specify.
• Sideline from Yahoo! allows users to create and group custom queries by topics of interest.
• PeerIndex is another option to help you discover authorities and opinion makers around a particular topic.
• MyTweeple checks out your Twitter account and analyzes who is following you back — a good way to monitor reciprocal relationships.
• MentionMap is a visualizer tool that lets you assess the most influential Twitter users in various sectors.
• Twitterfall is a great way to keep up on conversations about an event, or an online chat, using hashtags. You can also use its geolocation panel to see discussions in a geographic area.

Facebook Search: Explore FB conversations

8There are rich conversations taking place about your sector on Facebook right now. So don’t overlook Facebook Search as a monitoring tool. Unearth the people on Facebook who are talking about your brand or cause. Use the Facebook search field and then choose “Posts by Everyone” in the left navigation. You may find new Pages to Like and new people to interact with.

• Openbook may also be useful in turning up mentions of your brand in Facebook status updates.

Monitor upcoming events

Plancast: Stay on top of upcoming events

9Like many of my colleagues, I’ve ditched Yahoo’s Upcoming and moved to Plancast. You can subscribe to get an RSS alert on any new event that matches keywords you select. Keep track of events thrown by your competitors, or stay on top of conferences you may want to attend or co-sponsor.

Monitor with alerts

Google Alerts: Your real-time personal assistant

10Nearly every plugged-in user these days knows about Google Alerts. When Google’s vast army of bots discover a new blog entry or news story that contains a keyword or phrase you specify, it will send you an alert in a time frame you designate: immediately, daily or weekly. What’s more, you can receive alerts via feeds sent to your RSS reader. Enter the topic you want to monitor, then click preview to see the type of results you’ll receive. Keep current on your brand, cause, sector or industry — and, of course, mentions of your own name. Also keep in mind that Google Alerts tracks only content indexed by Google.

Related:
• A new service, Google Realtime Search, lets you search the social Web (chiefly Twitter) and create email alerts for search terms.
• TweetBeep is sort of a Google Alert for Twitter. It uses search.twitter.com site for mentions of up to 10 keywords or phrases you specify and will send you emails.

BackType: Track comments & influencers

11BackType Alerts is a free service that sends you email updates whenever a search term is mentioned in a comment. Somebody trash your brand in a blog comment? You’ll want to know right away. BackType will also show you your Twitter influencers who are sharing related links.

Update: BackType was acquired by Twitter in 2011 and is now closed.

Yahoo Pipes: Mash up your content feeds

12Yahoo Pipes is a powerful tool that lets you aggregate and remix content from anywhere online. Its visual interface makes it fairly easy to use. You can use it in innumerable ways — for example, to track Twitter for mentions of your brand, to monitor multiple feeds or to alert you only when feed activity meets a certain activity threshold. For a good example of Yahoo Pipes in action, look at this Social Media Firehose tool, which lets you track your brand or product mentions across a slew of social media sites.

Northern Light: Roll your own search alerts

13Remember the days when editorial filtering counted for something? Northern Light Search has been around forever, it seems. A business research tool, it indexes more than 800 news sources and publications, like the Wall Street Journal and PBS NewsHour, and some 1,600 authoritative industry blogs. They write: “We have editorially honed the content to include only business sources and to exclude the shopping and other consumer sites that clog your results on other search engines.” It offers support for full Boolean queries as well as saved search and alerting capabilities. You can create Search Alerts via email or RSS to help you track subjects you care about.

Monitor with social search

Addict-o-matic: Check the buzz about a topic

14Addict-o-matic lets you instantly create a custom page with the latest buzz on a given topic. The browser-based tool offers a one-stop customized site for seeing results across multiple social media channels.

Alternatives:
• Guzzle reads hundreds of feeds on social media sites every second to help you keep abreast of stuff you care about.
• Buzzoo is a buzz aggregator drawing from multiple sources.
• BuzzFeed sports a robust buzz-detection algorithm.
• Twendz, a free tool from Waggener Edstrom, piggybacks off Twitter Search to offer user sentiment in real time.
• Social Seek will tell you who’s making the most noise about your brand.
• How Socialble? sizes up how visible your brand is on the social Web.
• Mon.itor.us is a free website, server and traffic monitoring service.
• See more choices under Twitter, above.

MonitorThis: Browse 26 search engines

1577elements’ monitorThis is a meta-search engine (remember those?) that let you comb through 26 search engines to look for blog posts, news articles, photos, tags and tweets on a specific subject. You may be surprised by some of the results on the more obscure search engines.

Alternative:
• Keotag lets you search multiple search engines, create social bookmark links around a topic or see who has used your brand as a tag.

Monitor comments & forums

Comment Sniper: First mover advantage

16If you have the staff to help manage your brand’s reputation in a deep way, then Comment Sniper is worth a look. Comment Sniper offers you a way to build targeted traffic to your site at no cost by giving you the opportunity to be the first to comment on relevant blog posts about your brand or sector. You set up blogs you want to monitor, and Comment Sniper sends you a desktop notification or text message to your mobile device whenever a new post goes up. Check this tutorial on how to make the process more efficient.

coComment: Keep track of conversations

17coComment is a Web service and Firefox plug-in that helps you keep track of blog comment threads. Whenever there is an update, such as a new follow-up comment, coComment notifies you instantly. It’s a handy service that saves you the trouble of checking back on blogs that don’t offer a comment notification feature.

Alternatives:
• Commentful is another Web service that helps you keep track of blog comments.
• Omgili (Oh my God I love it) forum search engine lets you find communities, message boards and discussion threads about any topic.
• co.mments helps you keep track of conversations.

BoardReader: Monitoring 50,000 forums

18Not all forums and message boards are indexed by Google.BoardReader is a community search engine that crawls forums, blog posts, images and microblogs. It’ll also let you know when a new forum starts specifically to discuss your brand or organization.

Other forum search & alert tools:
• Boardtracker
• Big Boards
• Yuku Find

Monitor trends

Google Trends: Take the long view

19Google Trends gives you a measurement of the impact that bloggers or a campaign has on a brand. The tool measures the level of interest in specific topics based on searches people conduct over a period of time. One interesting facet is that you can compare multiple sites in the same sector and see the geographic regions where a keyword is most popular.

Related: With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and other properties.

Other choices:

• Trendpedia blog search from Attentio
• Social Trends from Viralheat

Monitor Web pages

WatchThatPage: Keep a watchful eye

20Sometimes you’d like to know when updates take place to an important Web page — say, your Wikipedia page or key pages on your competitors’ sites. Instruct WatchThatPage to keep tabs on any Web page, and you’ll receive an alert any time a change is made to the page.

Alternative: Copernic Tracker ($40)

More free social media monitoring tools

Several companies offer free, limited accounts for commercial tools through the “freemium” business model — not just a free trial but an ongoing free basic service — including:

• Alterian SM2 allows you to search up to five terms with a total limit of 1,000 results, however, there are no real-time alerts, geography or language filters or advanced searches.
• Trackur
• Looxii

JD Lasica works with nonprofits, social change organizations and businesses on social media strategies. See his profile, visit his business blog, contact JD or leave a comment.

 

48 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

Originally posted on DreamGrow.com. Read the post here:

http://www.dreamgrow.com/48-free-social-media-monitoring-tools/

Priit Kallas 

If you want to know what’s happening in the social web you need monitoring tools. Before you get out your credit card and start to spend money try out some of the free social media monitoring services. This way you get a taste of what is available and if you need paid services.

I have collected 48 free social media monitoring tools. In the Group A are the services that I use regularly or seem interesting to check out immediately. The Group B is an alphabetical list of tools for you to play with. Here we go:

Group A

Seesmic

Twitter account: seesmic
Seesmic is a suite of social media management and collaboration tools that provide everything to build their brands online. Seesmic has applications on every platform, including mobile, and a marketplace of third-party plugins. Seesmic gives you social media monitoring, updating and engaging in real time.

HootSuit

Twitter account: HootSuite
Monitor and post to multiple social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. Create custom reports from over 30 individual report modules to share with clients and colleagues. Track brand sentiment, follower growth, plus incorporate Facebook Insights and Google analytics. Draft and schedule messages to send at a time your audience is most likely to be online. HootSuite has the dashboard for your iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and Android.

PostRank

Twitter account: postrank
Postrank has two tools. The PostRank Analytics (https://analytics.postrank.com/) gives you insight about your sites engagement scores and. Social engagement analytics covers over 20 of the top social networks. Find out who are your influencers, which content drives engagement, what posts are most impostant. And the best part is that you can also monitor your comperirors. You can connect PostRank with your Google Analytics to get even better results. PostRanks top ranked content (http://www.postrank.com/main) helps you to find most important blogs on any topic, use it to monitor your competition

Social Mention

Twitter account: socialmention
Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content into a single stream of information. It allows you to track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors over one hundred social media sites.

SocialPointer

Twitter account: socialpointer
SocialPointer is a real-time social media marketing platform for marketing agencies and individuals, It enables them to track, monitor and respond in real-time to relevant social mentions and user conversation. SocialPointer lets you monitor, listen, respond and engage.

SocialSeek

Twitter account: socialseek
Get all the latest tweets, news, videos, photos, and more on any topic you want in one place. There’s a Socialseek site for everything and you can even make your own. I found some of the news sources other tools missed.

Twazzup

Twitter account: twazzup
Twazzup is real-time news platform. It allows you to filter the news out of live Twitter content. It’s useful for understanding who are the influencers on a given topic and what are to trending sources.

TwitterCounter

Twitter account: Twitter
Twitter Counter is the number one site to track your Twitter stats. Twitter Counter provides statistics of Twitter usage and tracks over 14 million users. Twitter Counter also offers a variety of widgets and buttons that people can add to their blogs, websites or social network profiles to show recent Twitter visitors and number of followers.

Wildfire Social Media Monitor

Twitter account: wildfireapp
Measure your performance. Glean insights about the growth of your social media fanbase on the leading social networks. With daily tracking, you have visibility into growth trends small and large. Gauge your social media success against others in your industry by comparing your follower bases across the leading social networks. Alert system will inform you of meaningful trends and activity that’s relevant to your social presence.

Group B

Addictomatic

Twitter account: addictomatic
Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s a tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and get info on what’s up, what’s now or what other people are feeding on. You can personalize your results dashboard and keep coming back to your personalized results dashboard for that search. News pages provide the latest headlines on topics such as entertainment, politics, shopping, sports and more.

Blogpulse

Twitter account: blogpulse
BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs. BlogPulse applies machine-learning and natural-language processing techniques to discover trends in the world of blogs. Different searches include basic, advanced, trend, URL and conversation tracker.

Boardreader

Twitter account: boardreader
BoardReader allows users to search multiple message boards simultaneously, allowing users to share information in a truly global sense. Boardreader is focused on creating the largest repository of searchable information for our users. Users can find answers to their questions from others who share similar interests. Our goal is to allow our users to search the “human to human” discussions that exist on the Internet.

Boardtracker

Twitter account: BoardTracker
Discover the influencers, monitor and protect your brand and reputation, find and engage your customers and critics. BoardTracker is a forum search engine, message tracking and instant alerts system designed to provide relevant information while ensuring you never miss an important forum thread no matter where or when it is posted.

CoTweet

Twitter account: cotweet
Free version is for individuals and organizations that manage a small number of Twitter accounts and need only basic features to engage and manage their conversations. Free version includes scheduling, conversation history, email notifications containing your latest mentions, team collaboration tools and access to Twitter follower profiles.

Facebook Search

Twitter account: facebook
Facebook search is notoriously bad and will not find much, but if you have nothing else to do then give it a shot. It relies heavily on your social graph so the results you get may not be meaningful for your target audience.

Google Alerts

Twitter account: Google
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (blogs, news, etc.) based on your searches. Enter the topic you wish to monitor, then click preview to see the type of results you’ll receive. Some handy uses of Google Alerts include: monitoring a developing news story and keeping current on a competitor or industry.

Google Blog Search

Twitter account: Google
Whether you’re looking for Harry Potter reviews, political commentary, summer salad recipes or anything else, Blog Search enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice. Your results include all blogs. The blog index is continually updated, so you’ll always get the most accurate and up-to-date results.

Google Trends

Twitter account: gtrendz
Trends allows you to compare search terms and websites. With Google Trends you can get insights into the traffic and geographic visitation patterns of websites or keywords. You can compare data for up to five websites and view related sites and top searches for each one.

HowSociable

Twitter account: howsociable
Free monitoring tool for measuring your brands or keywords using 32 social networking sites. HowSociable provides a simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web.

Icerocket

Twitter account: icerocket
Blog Tools, create your own Trend Graphs with the IceRocket Trend Tool. Enter keywords to see mentions trended over time. Trend Tool, enter items to see mentions trended over time. Enter up to five queries under Trend Terms. Type in the label you would like associated with each query under Display Labels. Search tool for blogs, web, Twitter, Facebook, news, and images.

Klout

Twitter account: klout
Klout’s mission is to help every individual understand and leverage their influence. Klout measures influence in Twitter to find the people the world listens to. It analyzes content to identify the top influencers.

Mentionmap

Twitter account: asterisqdataviz
Explore your Twitter network. Discover which people interact the most and what they’re talking about. It’s also a great way to find relevant people to follow. The visualization runs right in your browser and displays data from Twitter. Mentionmap loads user’s tweets and finds the people and hashtags they talked about the most. In this data visualization, mentions become connections and discussions between multiple users emerge as clusters.

Monitter

Twitter account: monitter
It’s a twitter monitor, it lets you monitor the twitter world for a set of keywords and watch what people are saying. Just type three words into the three search boxes and within seconds you’ll start seeing relevant tweets streaming live.

NutShellMail

Twitter account: NutshellMail
NutshellMail lets you organize, monitor, and interact with all your social networks from a consolidated email digest delivered directly to your favorite inbox on a schedule that you choose. Nutshellmail supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Ning.

Omgili

Twitter account: omgili
Omgili Buzz Graphs let you measure and compare the Buzz of any term. The Buzz is the percentage of the term out of the total number of discussions Omgili covered on a specific date.

Quarkbase

Twitter account: quarkbase
You can find out how good a site is, get comprehensive website details, discover competitors and analyze them. One can call Quarkbase ‘whois on steroids’ or ‘imdb for websites’, which provides detailed website information like people, traffic, similar sites, social comments, description, social popularity and much more.

Samepoint

Twitter account: samepoint
SamePoint.com tracks millions of conversations, taking place across in blogs and social media sites. SamePoint converts discussions into web pages, or permalinks, and organizes them within a tag cloud. SamePoint can serve as the nexus where the conversations meet, providing a single place for all discussions on a specific topic.

SharedCount

Twitter account: yahelc
Track your shares, likes, tweets, and more. Enter a web address of a page and find out how much it has been shared in different social networking and bookmarking sites. Currently includes Facebook, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn, Google Buzz and StumbleUpon.

SocialOomph

Twitter account: socialoomph
Schedule tweets, track keywords, extended Twitter profiles, save and reuse drafts, view @mentions and retweets, purge your DM inbox, personal status feed — your own tweet engine, unlimited accounts.

StepRep

Twitter account: steprep
StepRep provides an overview of the conversations people are having about your business online. Anytime your business is mentioned, anywhere on the web, you’ll hear about it. Sources are scanned continuously to bring you the most complete and up-to-date data on how your business is perceived. The data is broken down and analyzed in reports that can help you target your marketing and increase your online customer engagement.

Surchur

Twitter account: surchur
Surchur is the ultimate dashboard to right now. The surchmeter shows you how popular a keyword is on different sources: surchur, blogs and twitter.

Technorati Blogsearch

Twitter account: technorati
Search Technorati and note the authority and rank of the blogs listed in the results. Authority measures the site’s standing and influence in the blogosphere. Rank shows what position this authority gives the site. It is not a very good tool for lesser known blogs as it misses a lot of great sites.

Tinker

Twitter account: tinker
Tinker helps you stay on top of your favorite events by showing you the latest buzz from Twitter and across the social web. Create or follow an event stream by choosing a keyword. An event could be anything: the Oscars, a new iPhone release, a movie premiere, a book launch, or a Superbowl party. Tinker also lets you search for the top news, topics and places people are talking about.

TipTop

Twitter account: twittiptop
TipTop Search is a Twitter-based search engine that helps you discover the best and most current advice, opinions, answers for any search, and also real people to directly engage and share experiences with. A search on any topic reveals people’s emotions and experiences about it, as well as other concepts that they are discussing in connection with the original search.

Topsy

Twitter account: topsy
Topsy is a real-time search engine. Topsy indexes and ranks search results based upon the most influential conversations millions of people are having every day about each specific term, topic, page or domain. Topsy’s algorithms identify influencers for any searchable criteria, using these influence calculations to rank results. It displays results for related terms and articles, trending topics, identifies experts (influencers) and shows you trackback pages for everything in its index.

Trendistic (formerly Twist)

Twitter account: trendistic
Trendistic allows you to track trends on Twitter, similarly to what Google Trends does for Google searches. It gathers tweets as they are posted, filters redundant ones and compiles the rest into one-hour intervals. This way, it shows how the frequency of one to four-word phrases fluctuate over time. The result is a visualization of what’s popular Twitter users. You can enter a phrase in the search box to see how its frequency varies over time, or several different topics separated by commas to see how they relate: try comparing “skype” and “microsoft”(http://trendistic.com/skype/microsoft), to see how powerful it can be.

TweetBeep

Twitter account: tweetbeep
Keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company, anything, with hourly updates. You can keep track of who’s tweeting your website or blog, even if they use a shortened URL, Great for online reputation management, catching all your @replies and @mentions.

TweetPsych

Twitter account: TweetPsych
TweetPsych uses linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets. The service analyzes your last 1000 tweets. It works best on accounts that are operated by a single user and use Twitter in a conversational manner, rather than simply a content distribution platform. Created by Dan Zarrella.

TweetReach

Twitter account: tweetreachapp
TweetReach measures the impact of social media conversations. Use it to understand how many people were reached by tweets about a topic on Twitter.

Twendz

Twitter account: waggeneredstrom
The twendz Twitter-mining Web application uses the power of Twitter Search, highlighting conversation themes and sentiment of the tweets that talk about topics you are interested in. Using the twendz application gives a glimpse into what’s on people’s minds and their emotional reaction. Mining Twitter conversations alerts you to brewing trends, conversation topics and points of view.

Twitalyzer

Twitter account: Twitalyzer
Analytics for social relationships. Twitalyzer knows who is in your social network and where they live, allowing you to be more targeted in your outreach efforts. Twitalyzer provides Twitter’s most robust benchmark reporting, ranking Twitter users ten different ways. Authored by Eric T. Peterson author and blogger.

Twitrratr

Twitter account: twitrratr
Twitrratr built a list of positive keywords and a list of negative keywords. It searches Twitter for a keyword and the results are cross-referenced against adjective lists, then displayed accordingly.

Twitter Grader

Twitter account: grader
Twitter Grader lets you check the power of your Twitter profile compared to millions of other users that have been graded. Just enter your Twitter username and you’ll get an instant grade and report. It looks at a variety of factors including the number of followers, power of those followers and the level to which you are engaging the community.

Twitter Search

Twitter account: twitter
Use Twitter Search if you need to find out what’s happening in the world beyond your personal timeline. Twitter Search lets you search, filter, and otherwise interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to Twitter every second. Twitter Search helps you filter all the real-time information coursing through our service. Advanced Search allows you to create your queries using many advanced operators.

Twitter StreamGraphs

Twitter account: JeffClark
A StreamGraph is shown for the latest 1000 tweets which contain the search word. You can also enter a Twitter ID preceded by the ‘@’ symbol to see the latest tweets from that user.

Twitturly

Twitter account: twitturly
Twitturly tracks the URLs flying around the Twitterverse and provides a real-time view of what people are talking about on Twitter. When someone tweets a URL, Twitturly applies it as a vote for that URL. The more votes a URL has in the last 24 hours, the higher it ranks on Twitturly’s Top100.

WhatHashtag

Twitter account: whathashtag
WhatHashtag is service that allows you to find the most used Twitter hashtags for the keywords you enter. Search for the keyword and you will automatically get the most popular hashtags used worldwide to discuss your topic. The result retrieves the last 1.000 tweets related to your keyword, and orders hashtags by frequency of use. Using WhatHashtag you will gain visibility when tweeting your opinions, being read beyond your followers in the most effective way.

WhoUnfollowedMe

Twitter account: whounfollowedme
Who.unfollowed.me is a service that helps you track your unfollowers, in real time, without waiting for a DM, or email. It allows you to check your unfollowers on your schedule, every 15 minutes, without waiting for an email or a direct message.

That’s all folk. If you know of a great free tool then please let us know in the comments.

 

7 Hyperlocal Tools to Increase Business During Off-Peak Times

Read the origianl post at :

http://streetfightmag.com/2012/02/07/7-hyperlocal-tools-to-increase-business-during-off-peak-times/

 07 FEBRUARY 2012 BY STEPHANIE MILES

The employees are present, the tables are bussed, and the shelves are stocked. Now where are all the paying customers? Most businesses have slow periods or times of the day when they’d be willing to sell their products or services at a discount rather than let their inventory go to waste. The challenge, it seems, is finding the best way to do that.

New hyperlocal platforms aim to address this problem with real-time deals and offers targeted to potential customers in the immediate vicinity. By offering limited-time promotions during off-peak periods, small businesses get new customers through the door without displacing faithful regulars. Local merchants are often willing to accept the trade-off — which involves taking significant cuts off the prices of the goods and services they sell — if it means putting employees to work and unloading perishable products before they go bad.

Here are seven platforms that can help drive business during off-peak times.

1. ThinkNear
Developed as a way to help businesses attract the right customers at the right times, ThinkNear is a great solution for SMBs looking to increase foot traffic during certain hours of the day. Merchants tell ThinkNear what types of discounts they’re willing to offer and what hours are typically the slowest, and ThinkNear uses this information — combined with an algorithm that takes weather, holidays, and special events into account — to send targeted deals to people using smartphones nearby. In exchange for paying a $99 monthly fee, merchants are guaranteed that their ads will be seen by at least 5,000 mobile phone users. ThinkNear CEO Eli Portnoy says the service works best for restaurants, salons, spas, and other businesses in large-margin industries.

2. Chalkboard
Chalkboard is a hyperlocal network that uses mobile ads to help small and medium-size businesses increase foot traffic. Businesses experiencing a slump in sales can visit their Chalkboard account and type in the name of a new promotion, like half-off drinks or a 2-for-1 spa special. These promotions are instantly displayed on third-party mobile applications (like Friendly for the iPad) being used by people within a “few mile radius” of the merchant, as well as websites in the Chalkboard network. Merchants can run as many promotions as they want for a flat fee that ranges from $0.99 to $2.99 per day.

3. Closely
Small business owners interested in real-time marketing efforts are perfectly suited for Closely. The daily deal, social promotion, and mobile marketing platform gives SMBs the tools to publish offers and sell purchase-ready coupons on demand. Closely then delivers those deals to nearby consumers and promotes them on relevant social networks. A nail salon suffering from a rainy day sales slump can publish an instant deal to boost immediate traffic, while a restaurant that seems slow on Mondays can set up recurring deals that only run on that day each week. Closely doesn’t publish its exact pricing, but a rep for the company says it provides merchants services in the $50 to $200 per month range, with a 25% to 35% share of deal revenue.

4. Groupon Now!
Merchants who want to take advantage of the Groupon craze without getting in over their heads are using Groupon Now! to post limited-time deals for customers nearby. Local merchants can schedule their deals in advance to run during slow times of the day — like 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., for example. Once a deal closes, merchants get a check for the proceeds of the promotion, minus Groupon’s commission fee. Customers who fail to redeem their vouchers during these limited time slots can get full refunds, which means businesses don’t profit from unredeemed deal vouchers like they do with traditional Groupon deals.

5. LivingSocial Instant Deals
Remarkably similar to Groupon Now!, Instant Deals is LivingSocial’s take on real-time promotions. The service is best for merchants who’ve worked with LivingSocial before and enjoyed the experience. Deals are live for a short period of time, and they’re sent out to people using the LivingSocial mobile app within a half-mile radius. Merchants using Instant Deals don’t have to offer discounts as substantial as they would with a traditional deal, although LivingSocial still recommends that businesses offer deals that are at least 30%-off. Like Groupon Now!, LivingSocial Instant Deals requires no upfront costs and sends merchants their cut of the deals once the redemption period has closed.

6. Foursquare
Businesses that already use Foursquare as a loyalty rewards platform can leverage the service to attract customers during certain days or times by varying the check-in rewards and incentives they offer. Cafes wanting to boost their early morning sales can offer time-sensitive specials between the hours of 7 a.m. and 9 a.m., while retailers looking to get more people through their doors on a holiday weekend can offer charity donations for each check-in on specific days. Foursquare’s tools are free, which means the only costs merchants incur are based on the specific discounts and rewards they give to customers.

7. Qwikon
Most text messages are read within four minutes of receipt, which is why Qwikon believes that SMS marketing is the single fastest way to get real-time promotions in the hands of loyal consumers. The company provides merchants with all the tools necessary to gather contact information from customers in their neighborhoods. Once this information has been collected, merchants can blast out SMS offers any time they’re slow. Qwikon says 95% of these offers are opened within minutes, and the response rate ranges from 10% to 20%. Pricing for Qwikon is based on the number of messages sent per month, and varies from $49 to $249.

 

Social Media Spending Habits Rise, New Research Reveals

From http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/social-media-spending-habits-rise-new-research-reveals/

By Phil Mershon
Published May 25, 2011 

Are you wondering how other businesses are allocating their social media activities in relation to other marketing tasks?

This article reveals the findings of a few new research studies. What they found might surprise you.

Small Business Focusing Big Time on Social Media and Blogging

Small businesses are spending three times more on social media and blogs than larger businesses.

In HubSpot’s 2011 State of Inbound Marketing Report, researchers discovered that small businesses plan to spend 29% of their lead generation budget on social media and blogs. Asked the same question, medium to large businesses only plan to spend 9% on the same categories.

HubSpot’s conclusion: all marketers are increasing their lead generation budgets for social media and blogs. In fact, the average company increased their spending from 9% to 18% between 2009 and 2011.

The HubSpot report has many more important insights on acquisition rates and comparative data on various industries. Check it out here.

Social Media Spending Trending Up

64% of all marketers plan to increase their social media budget in 2011 according to Target Marketing’s Fifth Annual Media Usage Report. Email marketing is the only area where more marketers will increase their spending.

Email and social media are becoming rivals for acquiring new customers and customer retention:

• Email – 85% of marketers use it for acquisition; 90% for retention
• Social media – 75% use it for acquisition; 65% for retention

No-one belittles our current economic crisis. That’s what makes these trends even more interesting.

In a day where many marketing budgets are frozen, marketers are allocating an increasing portion of the pie to social media. Some might say they are panning for gold, but I think the signs show that they’ve already found some gold.

Match Social Media Spending to Your Experience

All businesses should consider their social business maturity as they establish priorities and their social media budget. This is Altimeter Group’s conclusion after conducting a study of 140 social media strategists at enterprise-level corporations (1000 employees or more).

While the data is derived from large companies, the principles recommended apply to businesses of all sizes. See which of the following strategies match your needs and priorities for 2011:

What about you? How do these reports get you to look at your plans for 2011? How do your social media spending plans compare to these trends?

About the Author, Phil Mershon

Phil Mershon is a strategic marketing consultant specializing in customized events, mission-driven campaigns and creative communication strategies. He is also assistant director of summits for Social Media Examiner.

Smartphones Outsell PCs

By Sarah Perez / February 8, 2011 7:17 AM

According to IDC, smartphone manufacturers shipped 100.9 million devices in the fourth quarter of 2010, while PC manufacturers shipped 92.1 million units worldwide. Or, more simply put, smartphones just outsold PCs for the first time ever.

The number of smartphones sold in Q4 2010 was up 87.2% from the 53.9 million sold in Q4 2009. For the year, vendors shipped 302.6 million smartphones - an increase of 74.4% from the 173.5 million in 2009.

PC sales were up in Q4, too, but just barely. From Q4 2009 to Q4 2010, the increase was only 5.5%. When looking at the yearly totals, however, PCs were still king. Manufacturers shipped 346.2 million units during 2010, compared with the 302.6 million mentioned above from smartphone makers.

How the Top Vendors Fared

IDC says that Nokia was still the top manufacturer during 2010, with 28.3 million units shipped in Q4. Apple was number two for the quarter, at 16.2 million, followed by RIM (14.6 million), Samsung (9.7 million) then HTC (8.6 million).

Nokia benefitted both from the 5 million units combined of its Symbian^3 phones - the N8, C7 and C601 - but most of its sales came from older devices.

Meanwhile, Apple gained ground thanks to increased volume in the Asia/Pacific region and specifically, Japan. It has also continued to make inroads in the enterprise market.

RIM is still popular in North America, especially its BlackBerry Torch and BlackBerry Curve 3G deivces, but its driving growth actually came from outside North America. RIM posted nearly identical year-over-year growth for both the quarter and for 2010, said IDC.

Both Samsung and HTC benefitted from their diverse portfolios, which, of course, include Android. According to Ramon Llama, senior analyst in IDC's Mobile Phone Technology and Trends team, "Android continues to gain by leaps and bounds, helping to drive the smartphone market, It has become the cornerstone of multiple vendors' smartphone strategies, and has quickly become a challenger to market leader Symbian."

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/smartphones_outsell_pcs.php

Social Media Ad Spending is Soaring- from Websitemagazine.com

According to analysis by eMarketer, U.S. social media ad spending will surpass $3 billion in 2011. That's an astonishing jump, compared to $1.99 billion reported for 2010, and a full $1 billion more than eMarketer's last estimate just five months ago.

Leading the charge, of course, is Facebook. Predictions charge Facebook as being responsible for $2.19 billion in 2011, up from $1.21 billion in 2010. When you add in non-U.S. ad spend on Facebook, the total for 2011 is predicted to be more than $4 billion. Facebook (and social media in general) is a very attractive option for penetrating foreign markets.

"2010 was the year that Facebook firmly established itself as a major force not only in social network advertising but all of online advertising,” said eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson. "In 2011, its global presence is something multinational advertisers can’t ignore."

Interesting to note is that of the $1.86 billion spent worldwide on Facebook advertising in 2010, more than 60 percent came from small businesses - not the giant corporate advertisers like P&G or Coca-Cola.

 

http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2011/01/19/social-media-ad-spending-is-soaring.aspx?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter

4% of online Americans use location-based services | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project

I recommend you follow the link and get the full report!

Greg

 

Overview

In its first report on the use of “geosocial” or location-based services, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life project finds that 4% of online adults use a service such as Foursquare or Gowalla that allows them to share their location with friends and to find others who are nearby. On any given day, 1% of internet users are using these services.

Location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla use internet-connected mobile devices’ geolocation capabilities to let users notify others of their locations by “checking in” to that location. Location-based services often run on stand-alone software applications, or “apps,” on most major GPS-enabled smartphones or other devices.

Key findings include:

• 7% of adults who go online with their mobile phone use a location-based service.
• 8% of online adults ages 18-29 use location-based services, significantly more than online adults in any other age group.
• 10% of online Hispanics use these services – significantly more than online whites (3%) or online blacks (5%).
• 6% of online men use a location-based service such as Foursquare or Gowalla, compared with 3% of online women.

http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Location-based-services.aspx#